I think when it stops raining and we can sit outdoors with him it will be OK. He needs open space to fly around in, that’s for sure. But then of course we fear he may get too bold in his enthusiasm and ignorance and wander into the wild backyards and thickets down the hill or chase a bird out into the street, and so get lost or meet the Enemy. The Enemy comes in so many forms to cats. They are small animals, predators yet very vulnerable, and Pard has neither street smarts nor wilderness wisdom. But he’s bright. He deserves what freedom we can give him. Once it stops raining.
Meanwhile, he usually spends a good part of the day with me in my study, sleeping on the printer, about a foot from my right elbow. He fixated on me to start with and still tends to follow me up and down stairs and keep nearby, though he’s gaining more independence, which is good—if I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog. My guess is that for the first year of his life, in a small and crowded household, he was never alone; so he needs time to get used to solitude, as well as to silence, boredom, never getting pursued or squashed by a passionate baby, etc.
Not wanting to be the center of the universe doesn’t mean I don’t love having a cat nearby. It seems we got his name right: he’s a pardner, a true companion. I really like it when he sleeps at the top of my head on the pillow like a sort of fur nightcap. The only trouble with his sleeping on the printer is that it’s six inches from my Time Machine, which when it’s saving stuff makes a weird, tiny, humming-clicking noise exactly like beetles. Pard knows that there are beetles in that box. Nothing I can say will change his mind. There are beetles in that box, and one day he will get his paw into it and get the beetles out and eat them.
Part Two
THE LIT BIZ
Would You Please Fucking Stop?
March 2011
I KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally.
There was one novel I read where the novelist didn’t only make all the fucking characters say fuck and shit all the time but she got into the fucking act herself, for shit sake. So it was full of deeply moving shit like “The sunset was just too fucking beautiful to fucking believe.”
I guess what’s happened is that what used to be a shockword has become a noise that’s supposed to intensify the emotion in what you’re saying. Or maybe it occurs just to bridge the gap between words, so that actual words become the shit that happens in between saying fucking?
Swearwords and shockwords used to mostly come out of religion. Damn, damn it, hell, God, God-damned, God damn it to hell, Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ Almighty, etc. etc. A few of them appeared, rarely, in nineteenth-century novels, usually as —— or more bravely as By G—! or d—n! (Archaic or dialect oaths such as swounds, egad, gorblimey were printed out in full.) With the twentieth century the religious-blasphemy oaths began to creep, and then swarm, into print. Censorship of words perceived as “sexually explicit” was active far longer. Lewis Gannett, the book reviewer for the old New York Herald Tribune, had a top-secret list of words the publisher had had to eliminate from The Grapes of Wrath before they could print it; after dinner one night Lewis read the list out loud to his family and mine with great relish. It couldn’t have shocked me much, because I recall only a boring litany of boring words, mostly spoken by the Joads no doubt, on the general shock level of titty.
I remember my brothers coming home on leave in the Second World War and never once swearing in front of us homebodies: a remarkable achievement. Only later, when I was helping my brother Karl clean out the spring, in which a dead skunk had languished all winter, did I learn my first real cusswords, seven or eight of them in one magnificent, unforgettable lesson. Soldiers and sailors have always cursed—what else can they do? But Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn’t miss, of cooing at him, “Oh, are you the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck?”
And then came the sixties, when a whole lot of people started saying shit, even if they hadn’t had lessons from their brother. And before long all the shits and fucks were bounding forth in print. And finally we began to hear them from the lips of the stars of Hollywood. So now the only place to get away from them is movies before 1990 or books before 1970 or way, way out in the wilderness. But make sure there aren’t any hunters out in the wilderness about to come up to your bleeding body and say, Aw, shit, man, I thought you was a fucking moose.
I remember when swearing, though tame by modern standards, was quite varied and often highly characteristic. There were people who swore as an art form—performing a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected. It seems weird to me that only two words are now used as cusswords, and by many people used so constantly that they can’t talk or even write without them.
Of our two swearwords, one has to do with elimination, the other (apparently) with sex. Both are sanctioned domains, areas like religion where there are rigid limits and things may be absolutely off-limits except at certain specific times or places.
So little kids shout caca and doo-doo, and big ones shout shit. Put the feces where they don’t belong!
This principle, getting it out of place, off-limits, the basic principle of swearing, I understand and approve. And though I really would like to stop saying Oh shit when annoyed, having got on fine without it till I was thirty-five or so, I’m not yet having much success in regressing to Oh hell or Damn it. There is something about the shh beginning, and the explosive t! ending, and that quick little ih sound in between…
But fuck and fucking? I don’t know. Oh, they sound good as curses too. It’s really hard to make the word fuck sound pleasant or kindly. But what is it saying?
I don’t think there are meaningless swearwords; they wouldn’t work if they were meaningless. Does fuck have to do with sex primarily? Or sex as male aggression? Or just aggression?